The Current 360 Backlog

Here’s the current stack of gamings sitting on top of my 360 competing for play-time. From the top of the list:

Rainbow Six: Vegas – I re-purchased this game when it was available from Amazon for $19.99. I had traded it away originally before giving the campaign much of a try. Now I’m back at it and enjoying shooting up the casinos, especially in co-op mode.

Star Wars: The Complete Saga – the shrink wrap is still on this one, but that’s only because I’m waiting for others to become strong in the force so I can tackle the missions co-op. Episodes I – III would normally be a chore to play through, but I’m hoping that their lego versions are much easier to stomach.

The Orange Box - Thanks to Team Fortress 2, The Orange Box has been my multiplayer game of choice lately. It’s just way too much fun and the people I’ve encountered playing this on Xbox Live are light years better than the foul-mouthed, homophobic and racists asshats I normally encounter in Halo. I do hope to finish Half Life 2 and Episode 2 eventually as well. Portal… ahhh… what more can I say…

Guitar Hero III – I recently just picked this game back up and have been trying to rock out some achievements. It’s good, but I expected much more from out of it’s on-line portion. Not many songs I really like this time around, but it’s still a fun party game.

Monster Madness – this game is just about dead to me now. There are some achievements I’d still like to get, but it’s more grinding that I’m just not up to doing. This game really could’ve been great had the developers taken care of it’s suicide-inducing shortcomings.

Stuntman: Ignition - Almost forgot I had this game. I got frustrated at one of the scenes and haven’t picked it back up since then. Need to give the multiplayer a shot now that there are other stuntmen on my friends list.

Ace Combat 6 - YEEHAWWW! This game is too much fun. Looks beautiful and it’s a good time to play, but I really only have the endurance for one mission at a time. They are pretty long missions, so I guess it’s somewhat understandable. Gotta get back into the hot seat on those co-op missions again. Hopefully I won’t be blasted out of the sky so quickly now that I’ve got a bit more air time.

Assassin’s Creed – this game just showed up in the mail recently from Goozex. I only played a little bit, but haven’t been paying too much attention to the story. Instead I’ve just been going around killing everyone. Yeah, I know it’s terrible – but it’s such good fun

Posted in Video Games | No Comments »

Thanks Tim & Hil, Alex & Risa, and John & Jenissa

Nothing like celebrating a birthday with good friends and good food!

Posted in Video Games, wishlist | No Comments »

I’m really not this nerdy, I swear

Thanks to Google documents I’ve now realized I have a love of spreadsheets and statistics. Not of useful information mind you, but of much more innate things such as my video game spending habits. I did a pretty good job of keeping track of my spending last year with Google Docs. Enough to tell you that I obtained (via trades and purchases) 46 video games in 2007. The total value for these games (MSRP) $1,775.00 of which I only spent $536.00 saving a grand total of $1,239.00

I’m got a few more useless facts from last year, but nothing that will compare to the spreadsheet I just cooked up for 2008. This year I plan to capture not only cost and savings information, but also such benign facts as how many days after a game’s release did I wait to pick it up, how long I hold on to games before trading them away, and how it all relates to extending my gaming budget.

Very nerdy, yes I know – but I’m eagerly awaiting getting my first bits of data into this spreadsheet to watch all the formulas come to life. Be sure to check back at the end of 2008 to see how the stats pan out

Posted in Video Games, gadgets, wishlist | No Comments »

Finally Upgraded!

Finally got around to upgrading my laptop’s memory to its max of 2GB. Quite the improvement over the meager 512MB that was installed. I have to hand it to my laptop, it has treated me well for the past few years, and hopefully with it’s new found RAM has some good years ahead of it yet.

Posted in gadgets | No Comments »

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin boxart

Finally caught a glimpse of the box art for the latest Advance Wars game now titled ‘Days of Ruin’. This is one of my most anticipated games for 2008, so I’m pretty lucky that it’s coming out in January. My goal of getting 300 medals in Dual Strike before this game comes out however is pretty much a loss. I’m down to 25 left, but dammit who has the time.

Posted in Video Games | No Comments »

T&C Surf Designs

I’m not entirely sure what I was doing today that made me nostalgic about T&C Surf Designs. Somehow though I couldn’t stop thinking about ‘Da’ Boys’ and pretty much every single t-shirt I owned throughout my adolescent years. Perhaps an odd fashion choice for a non-surfing kid (though I did ride a skateboard) from New Jersey, but if I could find a T&C shirt anywhere it was mine.

I did some Google-ing to learn more about the origins of both T&C and ‘Da Boys’ and found some very interesting stuff. T&C Surf Designs was founded back in 1971 by Craig Sugihara in Pearl City, Hawaii ( www.tcsurf.com). While the site provides an interesting history behind the beginnings of T&C I was more interested to find out how a surf shop in Hawaii and a bunch of cartoon characters ended up in a t-shirt on my back. That led me to Steve Nazar (www.stevenazar.com) the artist behind the characters.

Steve’s website contains an assortment of his artwork as well as information regarding the fate of these legendary (in my mind at least) characters. He sums things up as follows:

“n the late eighties, for reasons unknown to me, there was a dramatic split within the T&C organization. The net result was that the Hawaii-based group, who founded the company and owned the rights to the T&C name and logo went one way, and the California-based group, with whom I had developed the classic characters went another, retaining the rights to the characters only.

In short, the Logo never did as well without the Characters, and the Characters died without the Logo.”

Such as sad fate for such a lovable bunch. They must have been pretty popular during the 80’s though as there were two T&C games released on the NES. The first, Wood & Water rage was glued into my NES for quite a while even though the gameplay was ‘limited’ at best. I still remember the ocean sounds that played during the title screen.

In the game you had two options, either Street Skate Session or Big Wave Encounter. You could also choose Wood & Water Rage which was a combination of the two. Even as a kid I was disappointed in the skateboarding portion of the game since it was more surviving an obstacle course than anything else. Didn’t stop me from playing the hell out of it though.

The surfing side of it was a bit more challenging, and I don’t honestly recall it 100%. I do know that I was pretty terrible at it and was either getting destroyed by a wave of a passing seagull. Still, I was excited at having T&C on my NES.

I look back very fondly at this image of ‘Da Boys’. It was listed as being available for sale on eBay from Steve Nazar, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Good thing as nostalgia would probably have me dropping a healthy bid on the artwork. There are a few T&C shirts available on eBay from Steve though they aren’t tempting me as much as I expected.

I think I’m just find to sit back this time and enjoy the fond memories I have of T&C Surf Designs and ‘Da Boys’.

Posted in wishlist | 1 Comment »

Monster Madness Review

I really REALLY wanted to like Monster Madness. At times, I even did manage to. But the bottom line is that Monster Madness is trashed due to sketchy gameplay, frustrating difficulty and an excruciating checkpoint system.

Lets start with the good first – Monster Madness has character. It’s good a good story with humorous dialog, good voice acting and tons of video-game and pop-culture references. On one of the levels there is a van that has an extremely similar paint job to the A-Team’s van. In fact, there are a lot of moments like that throughout the game that have me wondering if the developers had to ask permission to use such blatant references.

The characters themselves might be somewhat generic; the dude, the nerd, the princess and the misfit, but they are loaded with just enough personality to separate them from their breakfast club molds. I spent the bulk of my time with Zack, ‘the nerd’ and while his quips and comments were somewhat repetitive they were quite amusing. Since I didn’t get to try out co-op (more on that later) I’m not sure if there is any form of interaction between the characters while playing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the developers included that as well.

The game itself is a comic-book -esque, arcade-type monster fest with everything from zombies to aliens trying to stop you in your tracks. There are plenty of baddies to shoot at and no shortage of weapons to shoot them with. Weapons can also be upgraded thanks to the numerous weapon parts scattered around the levels and an extremely helpful character by the name of Larry Tools. Bring him the weapon parts and monster tokens (earned by dispatching enemies) and he’ll be happy to upgrade your firearms along with his gruff commentary.

The levels take you from suburbia straight to hell though you do make several stops along the way. You’ll battle through the streets, a school, shopping mall, junkyard, cemetery and more in your quest to save suburbia.

While you’ll traverse most of these levels on foot there are several vehicles along the way to help you as well as mix up the gameplay. These include a buggy, hovercraft and swam boat amongst all things.

This game is truly designed to be enjoyed co-op. That doesn’t mean you can’t take it on solo (as I did), it just means it’ll be a lonely road. Unfortunately (complaint #1) co-op is limited to off-line only, which basically means ‘no co-op’ to me. I did my best to try and convince the wife to join me in the game but she wasn’t interested

That’s ok though, because I chose to play the game in the ‘chase view’ which is more of a typical third person perspective as opposed to the default overhead mode. In co-op however only the default mode is available and it didn’t quite feel as smooth on the controls as ‘chase mode’ did. There are a few times during the game where you are forced into the default view and I ended up struggling quite a bit through those.

If this game could be judged on how it looked and sounded I would be inclined to give it very high marks. Every aspect of the design gelled perfectly into the comic book theme. Now however, its time to discuss actually playing the game. Heres where it disappointingly all falls apart.

Collision detection in the game became a irritating obstacle as I made my way through the stages. In some cases power ups or items were blocked by invisible walls, in other instances I would become lodged in place and forced to kill myself in order to respawn and continue. While this wasn’t a constant problem, when I encountered it for the 50th time I started to get a little agitated.

It might not have been a big issue perhaps if the checkpoint system was on drugs. I don’t know if they let the intern pick where the checkpoints in the game where, but heaven help you if you died between them. There were more than a few times where I shut the game off after dying because I simply didn’t have the energy to re-trace such a huge portion of my steps.

This issue might not be so prevalent while playing co-op, as you can revive characters from certain locations, but it was an abomination in solo play. Never before have I felt so punished in game when losing a life. Not really much incentive to keep playing.

Boss battles were made extremely frustrating with cheap one-hit kills. Eventually about half-way through the game I changed the difficulty to ‘Child’s Play’ because I needed to calm my stress levels down. I’m all up for a good challenge mind you, but Monster Madness is just pure evil torture at times.

Its just too bad that the negatives completely outweigh the positives as this game really had tons of potential. Creativity was through the roof with the concept, but the execution falls short of putting it all together. Perhaps with some bug fixes, extra testing and a little more TLC Monster Madness could’ve been on top, but for now it rests at the bottom of a very deep grave.

Worth fifteen bucks max, but honestly it’s only worth playing if you enjoy torturing yourself.

Posted in Video Games, review | No Comments »

15-Disc Alien vs Predator set!?!?

Saw this monster at Best Buy last night.(duh, it’s a Best Buy exclusive apparently). For a steep $170 you can walk away with 15 DVDs full of Aliens & Predators (4 Alien Films, 2 Predators, AV) and one additional Alien disc), a Alien vs Predator statue-thing (which apparently lights up and stores the DVDs in it’s base), as well as an exclusive comic book.

So, out of the 15 discs (each movie is a 2-disc special edition) you’ve got four definitely worth owning:

Alien
Aliens
Alien 3 (don’t know why everyone hates this one so much)
Predator

Two that I suppose are alright:

Predator 2
AVP (I didn’t really like it, but I didn’t hate it either)

One that is absolute shit:

Alien Resurrection (good god this was terrible)

And one mystery Aliens disc!?!

I would be pretty ecstatic if I received this as a gift, but it’s not the sotr of thing I would ever consider buying for myself. I already have the Predator special addition and I believe Alien & Aliens as well (though oddly those aren’t on my dvd collection list) so there isn’t going to be a whole lot interesting to me in this set aside from Alien 3 (which I could just pick up on DVD itself).

Still, it was pretty interesting to see the set at Best Buy. It is limited to 10,000 copies for whatever that is worth and also includes two movie tickets for the upcoming new Alien vs Predator movie which I will no doubt be going to see.

Maybe if it goes on sale… for $50 I’d pick it up in a heartbeat.

Posted in wishlist | No Comments »

Disney Eats: Sci Fi Dine In

Here is another of my favorite places to eat at Walt Disney World where the ambiance outweighs the food. The Sci Fi Dine In Theatre, located at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (new name) is a fantastic re-creation of a drive in theater under a star filled sky.

Tables are replaced with 1950’s-esque cars parked and pointed at a giant screen showing period-era sci-fi trailers and clips. While this seating arrangement isn’t the most convienent for families or groups, it can create a nice ‘date-nite’ type romantic setting.

In my experience, the Sci Fi Dine In is best visited for lunch as the dinner menu can be out of place for the setting and in my opinion wasn’t very good. Lunch however consists of fantastic sandwiches and milkshakes. The prices on the menu can be a bit higher than expected but just consider it the ‘atmosphere tax’.

After sitting for an hour inside the Sci Fi Dine In you can forget that just outside the doors is the blazing hot Florida sun. Great place to share with friends and a must-see for first time Disney visitors.

Posted in disney | No Comments »

Disney Eats: San Angel Inn

Located inside the Mexico pavilion at Epcot’s World Showcase, the San Angel Inn gets a big nod from me when it comes to the category of ‘ambiance’. The interior of the Mexico pavilion is fantastically themed from floor to ceiling. Add in a smoldering volcano, a river passage and an ancient pyramid and you have a enchanting setting for a sit down meal.

Unfortunately, the food at the San Angel Inn takes a back seat to the setting but it’s far from terrible. Chicken enchiladas and guacamole usually top out my order from what I recall as a ’slim pickings’ menu. Despite my qualms with the food, the fantastic setting of the San Angel Inn keeps me coming back time and again.

Posted in disney | No Comments »